With the proliferation of services over the Internet, the need for managing Web services has been on the rise. Web services are software services (i.e., services provided by a software module; e.g., a translation service that translates an English text file into a Chinese text file). The most prominent approach for managing Web services utilizes a Universal Description, Discovery and Integration (UDDI) based registry. UDDI is a standard for publishing and locating information about Web services, using an information framework for description and classification of information such as Web services, and interfaces for the Web services.
However, the UDDI-based Web service has several shortcomings. First, the UDDI-based approach requires the use of a UDDI-based database. The added cost prevents many small service providers from using UDDI-based registries. Further, UDDI-based Web services are not discoverable by general-purpose search engines (e.g., Google). This is because a service provider publishes a service by registering it with a UDDI-based registry, and a user must search the UDDI database of the registry itself to find such services. Although a Web-based interface can be provided for such searching, a general-purpose search engine cannot directly reach and search such as a UDDI database.
Further, the UDDI uses Web Services Description Language (WSDL) to describe interfaces to Web services, which makes discovering and selecting services difficult for users. This is because when a user needs to utilize a service, the user typically attempts to find the service by describing its purpose and/or functionality. However, services published using the WSDL typically only define service invocation interfaces without having descriptions about their purposes and functionalities, which makes discovering and selecting services difficult for a user.
In addition, when selecting services using a UDDI, a user often needs to consider other factors such as cost, stability, support, performance and resource consumption. Although UDDI-based Web service registries may contain some of that information, they are not easily accessible, which further impedes usage/acceptance of these services. Further, a UDDI-based registry only provides mechanisms for service providers to publish/upload their services, without means for users to provide feedback/evaluation/rating of the services. As a result, out-of-date services often frustrate users, and selecting useful services from a UDDI database requires a significant amount of user time and effort.
There have been attempts in using a Really Simple Syndication (RSS), used for content distribution, to make WSDL-based Web services searchable by general-purpose search engines. In such attempts, the URL of a service WSDL file is embedded in an item of a RSS feed which can then be discovered by the general-purpose search engines. However, such a RSS-based Web service discovery requires the user to have a RSS reader/aggregator on an accessing device and to subscribe to a RSS feed, such that the changes in the feed are pushed to the user device. Further, although users can voice their feedback about services provided by a RSS-based Web service discovery, such approaches do not easily organize the feedback and associate the feedback with corresponding services for easy access in selecting wanted/intended services. Additionally, such mechanisms do not enable the users to describe the purpose/functionality of a service. There is, therefore, a need for a method and system for searchable Web services that addresses the above shortcomings.